Obesity related health problems/ Why it is a billion dollars bet?

1. What can happen to your heart when you are obese?

Obesity can cause increase in blood pressure and heart attacks. When you have increase blood pressure, it can damage  multiple organs in the body including kidneys, heart, blood vessels and many more. The heart and the circulatory problems resulting froom obesity affect all organs in the human body. For example:

• a. Retina (impairs vision),
• b. Brain (stroke, paralysis, muscle weakness, dementia, bleeding in the brain),
• c. Kidneys ( failure to excrete waste product efficiently which may result to hemodialysis)
• Heart (heart attack, heart failure causing inability to breath),
• d. Swelling of the limbs and painful legs
• e. Dementia.

2. What happen to your Lungs when you are obese.?

Obesity hypoventilation syndrome(OHS) is a disease in which the excess weight can limit your chest wall movements and make you breathing shallow. Obstructive sleep apnea(OSA) is also a very common disease in obese and overweight patients. In OSA the throat closes on you while sleeping. In both cases people suffer from lethargy, day time sleepiness, chronic fatigue, frequent infections (pneumonia et al). Eventually heart failure and death can happen in these patients.

3. What happens when our belly gets bigger? Doctors call it central obesity?

The metabolic changes in obesity are much more known than before. Increase in the waist line is significantly related with metabolic syndrome (MS).

Metabolic syndrome consists of

blood glucose abnormality

blood cholesterol Triglyceride abnormality

Low good cholesterol (HDL) level

Increase waist line

elevated BP

The other condition called “Fatty liver” is also common in obesity. As it’s name, Fatty liver is the condition in which excessive fat seeps into to the liver. The fatty liver may sometimes lead into cirrhosis of the liver in long run. Fatty liver is one of the three most common causes of the cirrhosis of liver - where it turns into fibrosis.

Insulin Resistance Syndrome: it is a condition in which body itself becomes resistant to insulin. Thus insullin cannot perform its normal function. Insulin acts in the fat cell, muscle cell and liver cells. In fat cells, it releases fatty acid into blood stream. In muscle cells, it fails to pick up the glucose from the muscles and causes increased blood glucose. In liver cells, it reduces the glucose storage in liver, again causing the increased blood glucose. As a result, obese people have high glucose level despite having enough insulin in the body. That leads to diabetes, poorly controlled diabetes or insulin requiring diabetes.

What happen to the skin, bones and muscles if we are obese?

Osteoarthritis is the one of the obesity complication which sometimes can be reversed when people lose weight. As per definition, obesity is excess fat accumulation which is hanging on the body and most likely it hangs around the waist and hip. Despite the body becoming bigger and bigger, and the fat mass has becoming larger, all internal organs and bony structures remain more or less the same. The joints that are designed to carry the usual body weight are under tremendous stress as they have to carry a larger weight. Even the benefit of the joint replacement surgery is very much directly proportional to the ability to lose weight after surgery. Sometime despite the joint replacement, obese people may still be in pain if their body continues to be bigger.

The other problem with the obesity is “back pain and disorders”. It includes slipped disc, nerve compressions, and degenerative disc disease. As a result, it limits the ability to be active. Which in turn makes one gain more weight. And the vicious cycle continues. and increase discomfort.

Multiple skin breakdowns, recurrent infection, swelling of legs are the other problems we do see often in the obese patients.

Delay wound healing is also very commonly seen  as obesity related complication. The longer recovery from the surgery, the increased chance of surgical incision infection, abscess formation, the delayed healing and non healing and multiple recurrence of wound infection are all common in obese population.

Does obesity also carry higher risk of developing a cancer?

Surely yes. There is more and more evidence that obesity has higher chance of developing cancer. It increases the chance of developing cancers of the kidney, uterus, breast, colon, esophagus, prostate and gall bladder.

What happen to our reproductive system?

Infertility and polycystic ovarian syndrome are obesity related conditions and which can be improved with maintaining a healthy weight.

What is going on in the obese person’s mind?

They do not like the way they look. They feel guilty and shy. They fear that people will judge them according to their looks. They are frustrated. They do not have self confidence. They go out less and less. They feel hopeless sometimes. They may even feel depressed. These feelings are all completely reversible if they get back to their healthy weight.

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Obesity related complication and consequences are enormous and I believe that able to stay lean is way more than worth a billion dollars.